It isn't going to be as bad as the housing market crash, because degrees are revenue producing assets for the overwhelming majority of people and houses are costs for the overwhelming majority of people. Also, student loans do not have any mechanisms in them which are designed to induce payment shock, like ARM resets are. (I am only half sardonic there.)<p>If your loan repayments are $700 a month when you graduate, they will be $700 a month for the next ten years. There is no mechanism by which they'll suddenly jump to $3,000.<p>Even for degrees which you wouldn't expect great things from -- like, say, English -- the value of the degree exceeds the price by huge amounts. The NPV of a bachelor's degree in English is about a million bucks. You still come out ahead with virtually any college/loan combination possible, as long as you find a job with it, and unemployment among college graduates is still at ~4.5%.<p>There are a few degrees which are exceptionally bad decisions, but they are the exceptions rather than the rule. One example is culinary school, particularly the ones which will load you with the federal max of loans so that you can get a $12 an hour job as a line cook. There is one glaring sore thumb in the data for master's degrees, too.<p>If folks are interested, I'll blog about this in a few weeks. I did a project for a client looking at government data and a few other sources to try to get numbers on the worth of degrees by majors. The work is 99% over but, clients being clients, there are some more steps it has to go through before they want to launch it publicly.